The European Union is planning to invest €18m in the next generation of the Long Term Evolution standard, promising 1Gb speeds to those unhappy with the 100Mb/sec available from LTE.
The funding becomes available from the start of next year and the ARTIST4G consortium will be spending September deciding how to divvy up the loot …

COMMENTS

It's all hot air.

One thing that seems to get little discussion with mobile broadband is the contention between the end user and the mast. I thought that it's a fundamental weakness of mobile broadband and the reason fixed line services will always be better.

How much bandwidth can a mast have available to end users if we assume unlimited backhaul from the mast (which is itself very unlikely).

One possible reason.

Pulling the app layer off the phone onto centralised systems, turning the phone into a dumb terminal. You'd need low latency and high bandwidth to achieve that. It would also make monitoring for "security" purposes much easier.

So...

WTF

"Surely it's not necessary to "turn mobile phones into powerful mobile computers", as Ms. Reding puts it in the release."

Because current devices in their current usage modes don't require such speeds doesn't mean there's no value in considering future enhancements. Technology provides an enabler - often the uses take some time to catch up, and don't always match what was expected (3G was supposed to be all about video telephony - don't think I've met anyone who has used it for that). I don't expect to see such Luddite drivel on a tech site...

@Paul H

Daft.

I haven't lost the ability to use a pen and paper, seal an envelope, and lick (yuk! - dead horse glue) a stamp. (Shite - I'm now on the DNA register. So, of course, is the horse. [Grief! I'm a poet, and didn't know it])

I want a bloody "Speaking Telephone" for talking to people. I don't wanna watch Formula-1 on a tiny screen the size of a 5-bob piece. That's why I bought a fuc*king TV.

It's a solution waiting for a problem. Which won't necessarily happen.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then this invention must be a bastard child. I see no father mentioned there.